


Packaged with Care

by PreachingtotheQuire



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Christmas, Christmas Cookies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-10
Updated: 2018-12-10
Packaged: 2019-09-15 22:59:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16942344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PreachingtotheQuire/pseuds/PreachingtotheQuire
Summary: With gratitude to AHartintheWoods, for kind permission to do this riff – this is an alternate ending to her Christmas story, Care Packages & Ginger Cookies. Read hers first, at Care Packages and Ginger Cookies ( https://archiveofourown.org/works/12323346 ) – otherwise this won’t make much sense!





	Packaged with Care

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AHartintheWoods](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AHartintheWoods/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Care Packages & Ginger Cookies](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12323346) by [AHartintheWoods](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AHartintheWoods/pseuds/AHartintheWoods). 



_After his mother had died, there'd been no more packages, no more gossip, no more cookies to hoard, the taste of ginger a bitter reminder of what had been lost. He hated how often it featured in the cuisine of these postings, an almost constant reminder that he was alone._

~~~

On the day before Christmas, the woman whose Rice Krispie treats had been eaten by rats came to the post office again. It was late afternoon, and the heat from the sun dropping to the west was intense. She was hoping for a letter from her sister. While waiting for John to check, she noticed a strange smell in the one-room office, and asked him what it was. He said he’d asked a local what they did about rats here, and the woman had given him a handful of pungent-smelling ground tree bark to sprinkle on the shelves. Since then, John told her, the office had been rat-free.

  
Later that evening, three other aid workers sat down for a beer with her at the outpost’s only bar, and she told them what their substitute postmaster had done to get rid of the rats. One man at the table beside them heard her, and he said that he also had noticed the unusual smell. He and his buddy got up and joined the first four, and soon all of the aid workers in the joint were crowded around together, singing and talking and laughing.

~~~

It was close to 10 p.m., and John was sitting in his room, staring down at his hands. He wasn't going to get to sleep anytime soon with Christmas memories tumbling through his mind. He put on gym shoes, walked out of the Embassy, and started running on the 2-mile loop he had used frequently during his posting. When he got back, the lights in the bar were bright and cheerful. A vocal quartet had formed and was enthusiastically belting out "Angels We Have Heard On High." Gritting his teeth he turned away from them and set out on a longer 10-mile loop. When he got back, sweaty and panting, sleep still didn't come. He lay down on the floor and waited for dawn.

~~~

Even the smallest thing was vitally important at this tiny outpost, and soon everyone at the bar was chiming in with anything they could remember about their dour postmaster. Eighteen people had ended up together in their corner of the bar for the discussion. By the third round, all of them were convinced that since John had been called in as a substitute, his own care package must have been delivered to his last post by mistake. And since he was leaving on the Embassy plane at 6am tomorrow, immediate action needed to be taken.

  
The short guy who taught dryland farming techniques called for a fourth round, and a serious brainstorming session ensued. John didn't have a package. Everyone else had at least one package. This first fact was quickly agreed upon. John needed a package. John had family. Who didn't have family? Nobody was hatched out of eggs, contributed an entomologist. So where was his family from? Their postmaster hadn't said anything about where he was from, but he did say things. Saying things was important. So, according to what he said, where was he from?

  
Everyone was pretty excited by this point. One man ripped out the flyleaf of his "Easy Identification of Water-borne Parasites" handbook and called out for suggestions. Soon the options had been whittled down to just three: Los Angeles, Louisville, or somewhere in New England. The room became hushed as they all considered. He doesn't seem like a chowder kind of guy, said one young man who had spilled beer on his khaki shorts, making them several shades darker than before. That eliminated New England.

  
It really needed to be a real package, like, really, one girl complained, rocking her chair back precariously. There were murmurs of agreement. A package has to have postage, so... It turned out that no one got a package from Louisville, so Los Angeles it was. Several of them headed out to their tents with flashlights, and two of them walked over to the hotel. They all came back shortly with scraps of wrapping paper, and one had a big cardboard box. The guy who had received a package from LA waved a piece of white-ish paper above his head triumphantly; that piece, covered with stamps and cancelled by a post office in LA, would be the centerpiece of the project.

  
The one who had spilled beer on himself looked down and picked at the frayed edge of his buttondown shirt. He unraveled a dirty blue thread, and offered to use it to join the pieces of wrapping paper together. It was agreed to be brilliant thinking, since no one had any tape. A sewing kit was quickly found, and soon a large, uneven, multicolored stretch of paper was ready for wrapping up the mystery box.

  
That left the box. Or at least, what to put in the box. Each person thought carefully about what they had received, and headed off again to their tents or their bunks or their rooms. Items started landing in the box, both the precious and the mundane. Nail clippers and a package of emery boards. A tube of Neosporin. Everyone needs Neosporin no matter where they are, the contributor remarked drunkenly. A photo of somebody's cat, sprawled out on the keys of a synthesizer piano. A hand-packed can of peanut butter that was, surprisingly, half chunky on one side and half creamy on the other. A kid’s drawing in crayon of the United States flag. A sudoku book, a recent copy of the New York Times opened up to the crossword section, and a handful of glitter gel pens in bright colors. A blow-up world globe "so he always knows where he is."

  
A dark green fleece pullover, whose donor said his son still didn't understand that equatorial Africa is hot, not cold. A home-sewn miniature stuffed Raggedy Ann doll, with mismatched button eyes. Homemade blueberry fruit leather. Three tampons with a note that said they were good for nosebleeds, ear plugs, fire tinder, and presents for girlfriends in awkward situations. A set of hacky sacks. One (used) UCLA Bruins t-shirt. A handful of instant oatmeal packets.

  
The last two women decided to pool their resources. One had gotten a bag of candied ginger from home, and the other had received a whole nutmeg. There was a lot of laughing about the nutmeg going from Tanzania to the States and then back again to East Africa. The two headed to the restaurant next to the Embassy, where the zero-dark-thirty morning crew was already working on bread and pastries for the breakfast crowd. The women wheedled sugar, flour, baking soda, and molasses out of the cooks, and soon had a triple batch of cookies going in the oven.

~~~

At 5:30 a.m. John was already out at the tarmac, his half-filled dufflebag at his feet. He would be the only passenger. The pilot and co-pilot were doing their pre-flight checks on the aging Beechcraft King Air, dust motes in the rising sun haloing the aircraft. He pulled off his sunglasses and wiped the dirty lenses with his army green t-shirt, and turned to look back at the little cluster of buildings, lean-to’s, and the colorful pile of tents overshadowed by the three-story Embassy itself.

  
Suddenly there was a group coming toward him from the buildings, mostly aid workers according to their clothes. John frowned at them as they got closer; several were still drunk, and a couple others definitely hungover. The cluster broke apart and the biggest guy in the center ceremoniously presented a large box that looked like a prop from a Frankenstein movie. John dropped his sunglasses to catch the box, and several people asked him where he was from, all at the same time. Looking down at the box for inspiration, he saw that the center of the patchwork had a lots and lots of stamps, several of them with portraits of movie stars on them.

  
Hoping it was the right answer, he told them he was from Burbank, and the whole crowd erupted in laughter and back-slapping and self-congratulation. When things had quieted down, the three ringleaders announced that since John's Christmas care package hadn't made it to him on time, they had all decided to make one for him. John blinked, and a genuine smile came across his face for the first time since he landed here three weeks ago. A dental hygienist popped up out of the crowd, gave him a quick hug and a peck on the cheek, and told him Merry Christmas. The rest descended on him then, and he had to juggle the box carefully in order to shake hands and return hugs from every single person there. They were the most heartfelt gestures of affection he had received in a very long time.

Eventually John was pushed up into the plane with his dufflebag and the box-of-many-colors in his arms. Strapping himself in, he looked out the window, completely bemused. Most of the small crowd were smiling and waving at him, the rest talking animatedly. Suddenly one youngish man sprinted back toward the buildings, and returned almost immediately, clutching something wrapped up in tin foil. His chest heaving, he handed it to a woman and put his hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath. The woman on the second leg of the relay hopped up the airstair, handed John the silvery bundle and with a light Australian accent told him not to eat all the biscuits in one go. She kissed him on the top of the head and went out the door as the co-pilot started the props.

  
His chest tight, John waved through the window at the group as they fell back from the tarmac. The pilot put the sun behind him and as the buildings became smaller and smaller through the window of the plane, John opened the tin foil package. It was full of ginger cookies, carefully stacked in neat heaps. There was roughly-ground nutmeg in there, too, but they were still ginger cookies. As he chewed the first one with the care package sitting heavy on his lap, he told himself that the stinging in his eyes was from the dust of the African desert, nothing more.

  
_It was mid-life with Team Machine that he had first remembered the boy he had once been, courtesy of a cookie handed to him by Carter. "Ginger," she had said, "like my grandmother used to make." Then she'd smiled and he had felt for a brief moment at home. And, at the same time that he crunched down on the fragrant cookie, he wished that there was just a little bit of nutmeg in there, too._


End file.
